Christians in Need

Here are some of the latest reports we have to offer. Please check back often
as we will try to post new material on a regular basis.

Tomislav

Tomislav is forty-seven years old. He’s a father of eight and also has one grandchild, a little baby who’s about a year old. There’s no running water in the area that he lives, so he can’t draw clean water to give to his children. He doesn’t have enough money to feed his family. And he has eight children that he wants to send to school, but he can’t afford to buy books for them.

Asima lives in Belgrade, Serbia with her husband and their six children (five sons and one daughter). It was a privilege for us to visit that area a few years ago to distribute humanitarian aid and preach the gospel. As a result of our efforts, a little congregation formed in that community, and Asima and her family now attend that small church.

Ebadeta is a widow with five children. Her husband was electrocuted five years ago leaving her to raise their children all by herself. She has four daughters (ages 15, 13, 9, and 7) and one son (age 11). Her youngest daughter, Sylvia, should be attending preschool but Ebadeta doesn’t have the money to send her to school.

In Zemun, Serbia, there’s an old widow named Rafeta who lives under very difficult conditions. When we visited her, she was just on her way back to her shack house after collecting from the garbage dumps. She was pulling a wagon full of all the things she found and immediately began showing us what she was able to collect.

In one of the forgotten cardboard home communities in Belgrade, Serbia, there’s a couple named Erieta and Jamine who have seven children. Their daily work is going to the garbage dumps and collecting cardboard and whatever else they can find. Then they try to sell what they’ve collected and live from that.

Zucra is a Christian sister who has just recently come to know the Lord. When we went to visit her, she shared that her life is very difficult. The unemployment rate in that area is very high; it’s over sixty percent. Her husband doesn’t always have a job. When he doesn’t have a job, he has to go to the garbage dumps and collect whatever he’s able to collect, whether it is cardboard, paper, or metal sheets, and he tries to sell those things in order to provide for his family. But that’s not enough.

For so many nights, Ljilja, a poor Christian widow with four children, stayed awake listening to her sickly daughter’s uncontrollable coughs and desperate gasps for breath during one asthma attack after another. With no money to buy medication, this helpless mother had no other choice but to cry out to God in prayer.

In one of the 200 shack house settlements in Belgrade, Serbia, there’s a mother and grandmother named Yagoda. There are 20 people in Yagoda’s family, including children and grandchildren. This refugee family lives in two little shack houses side by side under a busy highway bridge. Their shack houses are made of cardboard, metal sheets, and pieces of plastic, with tires and metal pipes on the roofs to keep the cardboard from blowing away. With no sewage system, running water, or electricity, this family and so many others are living in utter poverty.